Symphony Saturday – Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Since this piece is going up between Christmas and New Year, I thought I would do something to maybe keep in the theme. I thought about it and it basically came down to “it’s cold now so I’m picking an ice level.”

Sonic 3 is probably my favourite Sonic game, it’s not usually most people’s preferred choice, but I enjoy it a lot. I wasn’t that great at it, so I’d mess around with cheat-codes to switch on debug mode to turn myself into a ring and fly through the stage. I intend to get back to it some point soon and try to finish it legitimately, but I’ve told myself that about so many games now.

Now to talk about the music. I’m a big fan of the Mega Drive’s music capabilities, it’s too low fidelity to create anything realistic, so people just got creative with it. There’s a lot on the system I’d love to feature here but right now we have this cool dance-ish track to listen to.

For those of you that didn’t know, there have been several claims by people that Michael Jackson worked on the music for this game, if you compare a some of the game’s tracks it can seem fairly obvious.

Even MJ collaborator Brad Buxley stated he was involved, speaking to the french magazine “Black & White”:

“I’ve never played the game so I do not know what tracks on which Michael and I have worked the developers have kept, but we did compose music for the game. Michael called me at the time for help on this project, and that’s what I did. And if he is not credited for composing the music, it’s because he was not happy with the sound coming out of the console. At the time, game consoles did not allow an optimal sound reproduction, and Michael found it frustrating. He did not want to be associated with a product that devalued his music.”

If anything, this piece of music sounds fairly similar to another piece of music Brad Buxley worked on.